Jake Grumbach, Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Washington, and author of the forthcoming book laboratories against democracy, joined Democracy Works to examine some of the myths surrounding federalism and state politics.
Listen now
Attendees arrive during the Great American State Fair Kickoff Celebration on the National Mall on June 24, 2026 in Washington, DC. The Great American State Fair runs through July 10 celebrating the 250th anniversary of the United States of America.
Growing up in Ithaca, a college town in New York’s Finger Lakes region, I had a very different idea of the Fourth of July.
Independence Day was a community ritual. Families gathered before the parade, children buzzed with anticipation, veterans and local officials passed by, fire trucks and marching bands rolled through downtown, neighbors greeted one another by name, and best of all, fireworks lit up the night sky. The celebration was modest, local, and imperfect in the way all genuine civic life is imperfect. It fostered a sense of belonging.
People could disagree about taxes, presidents, wars, schools, and everything else, yet for a few hours, they could share the same public space without being sorted into enemy camps.
That memory may sound nostalgic, but romanticizing the past is not the point. Civic rituals matter because they create a space where citizenship can rise above partisanship, reminding us that we share a political community even when we disagree about nearly everything else. Such rituals do not erase conflict, injustice, or the many ways America has fallen short of its ideals. But at their best, they affirm that the republic is older, larger, and more enduring than any faction, party, or president.
That is why President Trump’s announcement that the July 4 celebration on the National Mall marking America’s 250th anniversary will double as the “most spectacular TRUMP RALLY of them all” is so jarring. It erases the distinction between a national commemoration and a personal political spectacle.
A national commemoration should elevate the republic above the person temporarily entrusted with leading it. Trump’s instinct is the reverse. He takes the broadest civic stage available and scrawls his own name across it.
The National Mall is the symbolic heart of American civic life. It is where the country gathers to mourn, protest, celebrate, and remember. The Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument, and the vast public space between them belong to the people.
Turning that space into a Trump rally is a kind of democratic sacrilege. It repurposes a civic space for the glorification of one individual, erasing a fundamental distinction. The president is not the nation. He is an officer of the constitutional order, temporarily empowered and constitutionally constrained. When national rituals become extensions of his personal brand, the office begins to swallow the republic it is meant to serve.
Guy Debord’s phrase “the society of the spectacle” helps explain why this matters. In spectacle politics, public life is transformed into images to be consumed. Citizens become spectators. Power presents itself through symbols, performances, and carefully managed scenes. Trump did not create this condition, but he has pushed it further. For him, spectacle is not an ornament attached to governing. It is the substance.
That is what makes Trump’s announcement so revealing. The 250th anniversary of American independence should be a moment of civic memory. It should ask citizens to think about the republic: its promises, betrayals, achievements, and unfinished obligations. Instead, Trump’s own language turns the event into a spectacle of personal branding. The nation does not gather to see itself; It gathers to see him.
The result is civic displacement. The people are no longer participants in a shared act of commemoration. They are an audience. The National Mall becomes a stage set. The flyover becomes a prop. The fireworks become lighting. The rally playlist becomes the soundtrack. And the president becomes the main character in a narrative that is supposed to belong to the country.
This matters because democracies need citizens, not merely audiences. A republic depends on people who deliberate, organize, vote, serve, protest, volunteer, and hold leaders accountable. Spectacle moves in the opposite direction. It asks people to watch, cheer, identify, and repeat. It turns politics into a drama of loyalty and domination. In that drama, the leader does not serve the nation. The nation becomes the backdrop for the leader.
Defenders will say the criticism is overheated. Presidents have always used patriotic symbols, appeared before flags, spoken at national ceremonies, and connected themselves to the country’s story. That is true. The presidency is, by design, both an administrative office and a symbolic one. But there is a difference between representing the nation and replacing it.
That distinction is not academic. If the nation and the leader are fused, criticism of the leader can be treated as criticism of the country. Opposition becomes treason, protest becomes domestic terrorism, and accountability becomes betrayal. That is how democratic culture erodes, not always through coups or decrees, but through the steady personalization of public life. Institutions lose their independent meaning, public spaces become partisan arenas, national symbols become props, and citizens are reduced to fans or enemies.
The semiquincentennial should call Americans to something better: a reminder that the United States has always been larger than its leaders. The Declaration was a rejection of rule by one man, and the Constitution did not create an elected monarch. It created a system of divided power, public accountability, and limits on ambition. That is the irony of Trump’s July 4 spectacle: a holiday born in resistance to personalized power becomes a MAGA rally.
The country deserves a birthday celebration worthy of its history, its contradictions, its achievements, and its unfinished promise.
The best way to honor the Fourth of July, then, is not to join Trump’s shameless spectacle, but to turn away from it. Americans should celebrate the nation’s 250th birthday in the older and better way: gathering in communities, reading the Declaration aloud, marching in local parades, watching fireworks with neighbors, and reflecting seriously on the ideals that the document still places before us. The Declaration asserts that legitimate government rests on the consent of the governed, that rights do not flow from rulers, and that people have the authority to resist domination. That is the Fourth worth celebrating. Not a celebration for presidential vanity. A republic, still unfinished, still contested, and still ours.
Robert Cropf is a Professor of Political Science at Saint Louis University.
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio speaks with U.S. President Donald Trump during a Cabinet meeting in the Cabinet Room of the White House on May 27, 2026 in Washington, D.C. Trump met with his Cabinet days after saying a peace deal with Iran was“ largely negotiated” amid expectations around the re-opening the Strait of Hormuz.
As a former Republican, sometimes it’s fun to look back on the things we — I was part of a “we” at one time — criticized Democrats for, and not all that long ago.
Remember, if you will, when Republicans condemned former President Bill Clinton for pardoning his brother and his corrupt donor friend Marc Rich?
Or, remember when Republicans wagged their fingers at former President Barack Obama’s golf outings? Or his executive orders? Or his Syrian “red line”?
Or all the times Republicans went after former President Joe Biden’s gaffes?
While those criticisms may have been justified at the time, they look patently ridiculous next to our current president’s cartoonish and downright dangerous offenses.
Offenses like pardoning Jan. 6 insurrectionists — nearly 100 of whom have gone on to be arrested for, charged with, or convicted of crimes separate from the events of that day.
Or wreaking havoc on the global economy by instituting reckless tariffs on friends, neighbors, and enemies alike?
Or taking a proverbial sledge hammer to countless government agencies that have put every American in danger, whether on airplanes, in hospitals, at job sites, or in natural disasters.
That’s just a few, but nothing looks worse next to his predecessors than Donald Trump’s supposed Iran deal, at least as it’s outlined in the Memorandum of Understanding, the details of which Trump was loath to share.
And for good reason — they are shockingly bad and humiliating for the U.S.
I remember Obama’s Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action or JCPOA from 2015 very well. I, along with many Republicans as well as a cadre of foreign policy experts, criticized that deal for its obvious and problematic concessions to a very bad actor who we’ve long known could not be trusted. But trust was what we gave the Iranian regime, as well as sudden access to a boatload of cash — $100 billion, to be exact.
All of Obama’s provisions were temporary, which would allow Iran to restart enriching uranium upon their sunset; the deal didn’t address Iran’s ballistic missiles, or its funding of terrorist proxies like Hezbollah and Hamas; the supposed “anytime, anywhere” inspections came with a 24-day delay, if Iran so chose, giving them ample time to hide any suspect materials; and it didn’t require any congressional authority.
In short, I’d argue it wasn’t a great deal. But as bad as it was, it looks like the Magna Carta next to Trump’s.
Trump’s deal would give Iran immediate sanction relief and access to $300 billion, presumably to use to fund terror proxies; it doesn’t secure any upfront limits on uranium enrichment or missile development; it allows Iran to charge for safe passage through the Strait of Hormuz in the future; and it calls for Israel to stop its attacks on Hezbollah, another win for Iran.
Neither Americans nor the Middle East are safer than we were 100-plus days ago when Trump decided to pursue this folly. And in fact, our economy is weaker for it. But Iran is unquestionably stronger and more emboldened.
They’ve seen Trump’s weakness, unseriousness, and frighteningly limited appreciation for history. They’ve seen him retreat on most of his core threats to the regime, from bombing their cultural sites to ending a civilization overnight. And they’ve taken notice as he’s abandoned the promises that were supposedly central to his justification for war in the first place — regime change, liberating the Iranian people, and removing Iran’s nuclear materials.
What a waste of blood and treasure, not to mention American might and power, only so that our enemies can watch us limp desperately toward a conclusion that’s being described — by the right — as “unthinkable,” “appeasement,” and “the worst foreign policy blunder in decades.”
S.E. Cupp is the host of "S.E. Cupp Unfiltered" on CNN.
Kids and families celebrate the US Bicentennial near the New York Harbor in Lower Manhattan. Taken on July 4, 1976 in New York City, New York.
I was a girl in Philadelphia in the summer when America turned 200. The birthplace of America was electric in a way I've never forgotten — crowds stretching from the art museum steps down to the Delaware River, each city block corded off for parades, cookouts, celebrations, and the kind of noise that felt like belonging.
It was also, I know now, a particular kind of American moment — one that required something beyond good weather and a long weekend. It required a belief that the country and its highest office still belonged to all of us.
Back in 1976, we were not, by any measure, a country at ease. Unemployment hovered near 7.5 percent. Inflation had only recently retreated from double digits. The man who'd held the presidency before Gerald Ford had resigned in disgrace two years earlier.
We had every reason to feel hollowed out. And yet. There was something unbroken in that crowd. Whatever people thought of their government, and plenty thought very little of it, they believed the country was still theirs.
That feeling had a name. It was civic trust, the quiet, background assumption that whatever failures or corruptions touched the men in office, the office itself still pointed toward something larger than any one man's ambition.
On the eve of this Fourth of July, I find myself back in that memory, and I cannot shake the distance between then and now.
The surface numbers are, in some ways, better than in 1976. Unemployment currently sits at around 4.2 percent. Inflation, while persistent, is nowhere near the double-digit nightmare of the late seventies.
But numbers have never been the whole story, and this year the story underneath is one I don't know how to celebrate around.
Since taking office, President Donald Trump's personal wealth has grown by at least $1.4 billion. He accepted a Boeing 747 worth roughly $400 million from the Qatari government. He launched a cryptocurrency venture that, according to a House Judiciary Committee report, generated as much as $11.6 billion in holdings — while his administration was quietly dismantling federal oversight of the industry.
And then, last month, he did something that may be without precedent in the history of American self-dealing. Trump sued his own Internal Revenue Service (IRS) over the unauthorized release of his tax returns — and then, before the case could even be heard on the merits, his Justice Department settled it on his behalf.
The price of settlement: a Department of Justice (DOJ) addendum declaring the federal government “forever barred and precluded” from auditing any tax return filed by Trump, his sons, his family, or more than 500 affiliated business entities before May 18, 2026.
An ongoing IRS audit that could have resulted in a $100 million penalty against the Trump Organization simply vanished. Legal experts called it unprecedented. Senate Democrats called it a potential violation of federal law.
When asked about his family's financial entanglements, Trump told the New York Times: “I found out nobody cared, and I'm allowed to.”
In 1976, that sentence would have ended a presidency. It ended one —in fact, just two years before—though the crime was different.
What Richard Nixon understood, to his ruin, was that there were still lines. That the office did not belong to the man who held it. Gerald Ford, whatever his failures, knew this. Jimmy Carter, who would take the oath six months after that Philadelphia summer, put his peanut farm in a blind trust.
The question of self-dealing was essentially rhetorical, because the expectation that a president served the country — not himself — was foundational.
What's been taken from us isn't a policy position. It's not something the next election can simply restore, though elections still matter enormously.
What's been taken is the assumption of good faith — the idea, however naïve it may now seem, that the person holding the most powerful office on earth was pointed, even imperfectly, toward the public good rather than his own balance sheet.
The fireworks will still go up on the 250th birthday. Family, friends, and neighbors will gather. There will be plenty of flags flying.
But I keep thinking about that girl in Philadelphia, pressed into a crowd of strangers who all felt, despite everything, like they were celebrating something they shared.
I'm not sure I know what we share now, except, perhaps, the grief of knowing what we've lost, and the long work of getting it back.
Lynn Schmidt is a columnist and Editorial Board member with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. She holds a master's of science in political science as well as a bachelor's of science in nursing.
A view of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., on June 25, 2026. President Donald Trump jolted Republicans during a fiery appearance at the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, scrapping a housing bill signing ceremony and clashing behind closed doors with a party rebel who challenged him over the Iran war. Trump had been expected to sign the bipartisan housing.
Only Trump doesn’t care about housing
It was August 15, 2024. Then candidate Donald Trump stepped out of his Bedminster, New Jersey, golf club’s columned clubhouse to a gaggle of reporters. He was flanked by tables of groceries and signs showing the rising cost of food. Also on one of the tables was a dollhouse, meant to represent the equally alarming rise in housing prices.
It was a speech about the economy, the single most important issue of the 2024 election cycle, full of promises that went right to the heart of Americans’ anxieties. While former President Joe Biden and then Vice President Kamala Harris were contorting themselves to posture a good economy that just needed more time to recover from the pandemic, Trump was preying on voters’ very real fears of unaffordable gas, groceries, and homes. It was obviously a winning message.
In that speech, Trump promised, “We’re going to open up tracts of federal land for housing construction. We desperately need housing for people who can’t afford what’s going on now.”
As of mid-2023, there had been a housing shortage of nearly four million homes, according to the National Association of Realtors. Americans all over the country were either priced out of buying new homes due to low inventory, trapped in their existing homes by sky-high mortgage rates, or facing exorbitant rent hikes thanks to corporate investors buying up rental properties. Americans needed help, and Trump promised it.
Cut to March of 2026, when Trump reportedly told House Speaker Mike Johnson, “No one gives a sh*t about housing.”
That kind of thinking may explain why Trump this week suddenly announced he was canceling a signing ceremony for the bipartisan “21st Century ROAD to Housing Act,” a housing bill co-sponsored by Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Tim Scott that passed the House 358-32 and was approved in the Senate on Monday.
Trump instead demanded Congress pass the SAVE America Act, his controversial election grievance bill that doesn’t have enough Republican support to get passed in the Senate.
It’s just the latest in a line of policy self-owns where Trump has seemingly intentionally made life more difficult for Republicans hoping to keep their majority. Despite midterm elections occurring in the midst of a blistering economy and an unpopular war, they were surely hoping the housing bill would give them something — anything — to brag about when they returned home to their districts.
And very much to the contrary, Americans do give a sh*t about housing. According to a recent survey by the Bipartisan Policy Center, a whopping 79% say the cost of housing is extremely or very important to them. Eighty-three percent say Congress should take action on the issue — like it just did. Eighty-nine percent say the House and Senate need to work together to pass affordable housing legislation — like they just did. And 63% say they would be more likely to vote for a lawmaker if they helped pass legislation to build more affordable homes and lower housing costs — like they just did.
There aren’t many issues that unite Americans like housing does, and very few bipartisan policy wins Congress can point to, and yet, Trump is holding that bill hostage in order to get his pet project — which doesn’t even have the support of his own party — pushed through.
If you’re trying to make sense of something so nonsensical, as I’m sure many Republican lawmakers are, it’s certainly sad but not actually all that complicated. Trump said what he needed to get reelected and then promptly abandoned his promises in order to pursue his own self-interests, even if those interests are bad for Republicans and bad for voters.
That’s just the kind of guy he is.
S.E. Cupp is the host of "S.E. Cupp Unfiltered" on CNN.